DigiDesign Digidesign Pro Tools 8.0, Reference Manual

Page: 737 / 1112

Chapter 35: Arranging Regions 719
Sliding Regions
A region or group of selected regions (on the
same track or on multiple tracks) can be slid
with the Time Grabber tool to new locations or
to other tracks. This feature is useful in post pro-
duction applications where the timing of audio
events such as sound effects and dialog need to
be spotted to music, film, or video.
Sliding regions is affected by whether the cur-
rent Edit mode is set to Shuffle, Slip, Spot, or
Grid (see “Edit Modes” on page 445).
Shuffling Regions
In Shuffle mode, you can move regions freely
within a track or onto another track, but their
movement is constrained by other regions. That
is, if you place several regions in a track, their
start and end points automatically snap to each
other. You can then “shuffle” their order, but
you cannot separate them from each other and
you cannot make them overlap as in Slip mode.
In Shuffle mode, adding another region to the
beginning of a track moves all subsequent re-
gions to the right by the length of the region
added.
To shuffle regions:
1
Enable Shuffle mode (see “Edit Modes” on
page 445).
2
Drag a mono region from the Region List to an
empty track. The region snaps to the beginning
of the track.
3
Drag a second region from the Region List to
the same track, somewhere in the middle. The
start point for the second region snaps to the
end of the first region.
4
With the Time Grabber tool, drag the second
region to the beginning of the track.
Pro Tools “shuffles” the position of the two re-
gions. The second region now occurs first, yet
the two still cling together.
5
Experiment more with Shuffle mode by drag-
ging additional regions to the track and rear-
ranging them.
Locked regions (see “Locking Regions” on
page 730), and all regions occurring after the
locked region, are not displaced when other
neighboring regions are moved in Shuffle mode.
If there is not enough room to place or duplicate
a region in front of a locked region, the insertion
area is disabled.
If you place a region while in Slip mode and
switch to Shuffle mode, Pro Tools preserves the
relative timing and position of the slipped re-
gion, and any space between it and other
regions.
You can slide a copy of a region to another
location or track by pressing Alt (Windows)
or Option (Mac) while dragging.
To retain a region’s time location when
dragging to another track, press the Start key
(Windows) or Control (Mac) while drag-
ging.
With certain workflows, it is important to
exclude Shuffle mode in order to ensure that
regions stay time-aligned while editing.
Shuffle Lock prevents you from inadvert-
ently entering Shuffle mode by disabling all
key commands and control surface switches
for Shuffle mode. For more information, see
“Shuffle Lock” on page 445.